Homily:
4th Sunday in Easter – Cycle A
Friends, it's not axiomatic to
remind us that we are celebrating the 4th Sunday of Easter. As I scroll through friends’ Instagram posts,
many of them are marked “Quarantine: Day Whatever”. Many of us are having a hard time keeping up
with what day it is as we continue to “hunker down” in order to limit the
spread of COVID-19. So yes, for those
who need help catching up with their counting, it is the 4th Sunday
of Easter (or, perhaps, better stated in these circumstances, the 4th
Sunday of 2nd Lent). This
Sunday is also commonly known as “Good Shepherd Sunday” because the Gospel
reading for each of the three years of the cycle of readings is from the “Good
Shepherd” discourse in John’s Gospel, in which Jesus presents himself in the
image of a shepherd who leads his flock to fertile pastures and flowing waters
where they can satisfy their hunger and quench their thirst and who protects
them from every danger so that they may experience a life of complete joy.
This Sunday, therefore, has
also been celebrated as the World Day of Prayer for Vocations to the priesthood
because priests, who by their ordination stand in persona Christi, that
is, “in the person of Christ”, are called to shepherd Jesus’ flock in his name
here on earth. Thus, as we celebrate
Jesus the Good Shepherd this Sunday, we also pray for the men who have already
responded to God’s call to the priesthood and also that many more men will
respond to that same call so that Christ’s shepherding will continue and grow
in the years to come. With this in mind,
I thought I’d take some time today to share about my own call to the priesthood
in light of the scriptures we have heard proclaimed. I particularly want our young people to pay
attention, because God is calling each of you to some service in his Church and
you may find in my example a sign of your own calling and a way to further
discern what it is that God is calling you to in your lives.
I begin with the reading from
the Acts of the Apostles, in which we hear the end of Saint Peter’s speech on
Pentecost. After proclaiming to them the
truth of who Jesus is—both “Lord and Christ … whom you crucified”—we read that
those who heard it were “cut to the heart”: meaning, they were enlightened to
their error and felt great guilt for what they had done. In great simplicity they ask, “What are we to
do?” Peter gives them an equally simple
answer: “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness
of your sins.”
As a young man I had graduated
from college with an engineering degree and began working. A “cradle” Catholic, I nonetheless was living
a very materialistic and somewhat hedonistic lifestyle: meaning that I was
mostly worried about making money, buying nice things, and enjoying a life of leisure
as much as possible while doing some kind of work that satisfied my
passions. After a few years, I became
disillusioned in this pursuit as it was proving not to be very fulfilling and
even detrimental to some of my relationships.
This is when I started to take a hard look at the choices I had made and
to ask whether the choices I made were really leading me to authentic
happiness. That’s when God broke into
the scene.
In the midst of all of this, I
was questioning the faith in which I had been raised. During this, the parish to which I belonged
hosted a parish mission in which the priest giving the mission, Fr. Larry
Richards, promised that I both wouldn’t be bored and that it would change my
life forever. “That’s a bold promise”, I
thought, and so I decided to go. On the
first night, Fr. Larry gave his famous talk on “The Truth”. In it, he challenged us to ask whether we
have ever really asked God what he wants us to do with our lives. Because, he said, one day we will have to
stand before him and answer for what we did with our lives: the lives that he
had given us. By his words and his
impassioned presentation, I was cut to the heart. In other words, I recognized how selfishly I
had been living my life and felt great guilt for it. Before I could even ask “What am I to do?”,
Fr. Larry told us that there would be the opportunity for Confessions the
following night and I knew that I had to confess all the sins of my selfish
life to God and to ask for his forgiveness.
It was not enough, though,
that I ask for and receive forgiveness.
Rather, I also had to begin to seek God’s will for my life. Thankfully, Fr. Larry also provided guidance
for this: the life of prayer and study, frequent reception of the sacraments of
Holy Communion and Confession, and dedicating myself to living for others
through the works of mercy. This I
started to do, all the while making it my constant prayer that God would reveal
his vocation to me. After about 3
months, I heard him speak to me! As God
is wont to do, however, it wasn’t a voice from the clouds or a burning
bush. No angels appeared to me in dreams
and told me what God wanted me to do.
Rather, it was the voice of my mother, spoken in a moment of
frustration, in which God made known to me the vocation he was asking me to
accept.
For months, I was praying in
secret for my vocation, all the while thinking of different things that I might
do which could better serve others. Most
of these ideas surrounded my engineering degree. I was still working in the same job, however,
which I didn’t feel was really helping me to serve others in any great
way. So, one night I was speaking with
my mom and just catching up. I was expressing
my frustration with my current job and with not really knowing what to do next;
and my mom, being my mom, was offering all sorts of suggestions for what I
should do. I wasn’t happy with any of
those suggestions and, in a moment of frustration, blurted out “I don’t know
what I’m going to do, but what I do know is that I want to do whatever it is
that God wants me to do.” Right then, my
mom blurted out, “Well maybe now you’ll consider being a priest!” At first, I was speechless at the suggestion,
but then said “Sure, if that’s what God wants me to do.” And when a friend of mine at work the next
day confirmed that I should consider it, I felt like God had spoken to me and
began to pray about whether God truly did want me to be a priest.
In the following months I
became more and more convinced that I was, indeed, being called to the
priesthood, though I discovered that I wasn’t ready yet to pursue it. I was too convinced that I had to pursue it
in order to “make up to God” for all of the years that I had lived
selfishly. Atonement for past sins is a
good thing of course, but it’s not a great reason to choose your vocation. So, I put it aside for a while and continued
to give myself to the good work I had begun after the parish mission: the work
of prayer and study, frequent reception of the sacraments, and the works of
mercy.
A couple of years later, I met
a young woman and we started dating. I
quickly became convinced that this was from God and prayed (hoped, really) that
this was God’s final answer to my vocation question: I was called to be married
and start a family. A few months into
the relationship, however, her mother, responding to a prompting from the Holy
Spirit, warned her daughter that I wasn’t doing something that God was calling
me to do and so she shouldn’t go much further in that relationship until I
figured that out and began to do it.
When she shared this with me, I was cut to the heart once again. I recognized how I had let myself become
complacent in my religiosity and thus dulled to hearing God’s voice. I went to confession and threw myself into
discernment once again; and, eventually, God used the voice of another person
(a friend from my parish) to reveal to me that he was calling me to be a
priest. This time, however, I was ready
to respond since I had as my motivation nothing more than to do God’s will for
the sake of his will.
My friends, whether you are
discerning God’s vocation for your life or just what God wants from you during
this time of crisis, it often begins with an experience of being “cut to the
heart”: that is, a realization that you have not been attuned to God’s will,
but rather have been living more for yourself and so experience guilt and the
desire to set yourself on God’s will once again. This experience, though often unpleasant, is
not a punishment from God, but rather a grace: a grace that can move you to
seek God’s voice once again. This is
important because of what we heard in our Gospel reading today.
In this “Good Shepherd”
discourse, Jesus says, “When the [shepherd] has driven out all his own, he
walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice.” Because God has made Jesus “both Lord and
Christ”, he is our shepherd. He has
called us and he walks ahead of us to lead us.
We will follow him only if we first have come to know his voice and to
trust him. When I first began to discern
my vocation, I had to spend a lot of time in prayer, listening for his voice
both in silence and through the Scriptures.
Having learned to hear his voice, I could then follow it when I heard it. In spite of all of my good intentions, I
would never had discovered this vocation had I relied on my own reasoning. Instead, I had to listen for the voice of my
shepherd, Jesus, and then respond. A
peaceful heart that makes frequent acts of trust (such as St. Faustina’s
“Jesus, I trust in you!”) is ready to hear and to respond to Jesus’ voice.
Dear young people, on this
World Day of Prayer for Vocations, I implore you, as Peter implored those who
heard him speak on Pentecost, “Save yourselves from this corrupt
generation”! Jesus, the Good Shepherd,
wants to give you life and life in abundance!
Do not seek comfort in this world, for you were not made for comfort,
you were made for greatness! Only Jesus,
the Good Shepherd, can lead you to the greatness that he has planned for you: a
share in his cross that will make you a shining beacon of light drawing more
and more people into his sheepfold: the abundant life that is communion with
him. Young men, especially, ask Jesus if
he wants you to be his priest and be ready to say “yes” if he does. I promise you that Jesus will not abandon you
if you abandon yourself to him. Mary,
our Mother, is ready to help you if you turn to her and ask for it.
To all of us, if you have not
yet asked yourself what it is that God wants from you during this time and in
the time ahead, beware. This “2nd
Lent” is not a time to be endured and nothing more. Rather it is a time for an even deeper
renewal and cleansing of our hearts so that we might follow our Shepherd more
closely again. If you remember, way back
at the beginning of this lockdown, I encouraged us to use this time to think of
what we want our “new normal” to be once it is lifted. If you haven’t discussed this with Jesus,
yet, then you’re not yet ready for it to come.
Make good use of this time, then, to clean up your spiritual lives, even
as, perhaps, you clean up your houses. Make
resolutions to embrace the spiritual life more fully now and once this lockdown
ends. Make time now for prayer and
study, and for exercising the spiritual and (where possible) corporal works of
mercy. Make yourself ready to return to
the sacraments. Make time now to ask God
what it is that he wants from you now and into the future. This is our chance to make our “new normal” a
“better normal”: a normal of God’s kingdom manifest among us. Let us not waste this chance.
Friends, Jesus, our shepherd,
is leading us. Let us follow him, for he
is our only hope.
Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – May 3rd,
2020
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